Empty A E

I had thought I'd already typed this post but apparently not.  So apologies if this is a bit sketchy; I thought it up months ago and have probably forgotten some aspects of it.

In the Circe chapter of Ulysses, Stephen plays the piano.  "With two fingers he repeats once more the series of empty fifths."  I think it's because I'm a musician that I figured out the metaphor here.  (I also have a blog for music thoughts.)

In music, a fifth is a distance between two notes in a scale.  The distance between A and E in the A major scale (A, B, C#, D, E, F#, G#, A) is a fifth.  To get a chord, you have three notes - a tonic, a third (or a minor third), and a fifth.  A major is A, C#, E; A minor is A, C, E.  (My terrible music pun is that A minor is ace.)

But what's interesting about Stephen's playing the piano is that it's only fifths.  He's not playing a major third or a minor third in between the two notes.  That's what I think the "empty fifth" means.  The fifth is not colored by a major third or a minor third.  A major third would sound happy, and a minor third would sound sad.  This is neither; it's just empty.

I used the fifth from A to E to demonstrate all of this because I think Joyce wants the reader to notice that fifth specifically.  Earlier in the novel, the other characters talk about a poet called A. E.  They criticize his poetry for being dull and repetitive.  The empty fifths - without the happiness of a major third or the sadness of a minor third - reflect that.  A. E. the poet is boring; A to E the empty fifth is boring.

Rivers and Waters

This is the second of two posts about The Fault in Our Stars.  You can find the other one here.

A few days after I re-read The Fault in Our Stars for the second time (my third time reading it), I had already had the idea regarding the metaphorical and literal nature of the names.  In addition to what I had thought up, Hazel is explained in the novel as an in-between color, which reflects how Hazel is between life and death or even between health and incapacitating sickness.  So this got me thinking about the names, and I realized that one is never really explained:  Anna, the girl in An Imperial Affliction.

I figured that if there were metaphorical implications for both Augustus Waters' and Hazel's names, there had to be one for Anna's too.  Her context is what led me to figure it out.  An Imperial Affliction ends in the middle of a sentence, and, as far as I know, there is only one other book that ends in the middle of a sentence - James Joyce's Finnegans Wake.  I've not read Finnegans Wake yet, but we talked about it a little in the class I had on Joyce's Ulysses, so I know that the first and last sentences of the novel are the same sentence, which is just broken between the two ends.  Rivers are an important factor in the novel, and the last sentence is meant to flow back into the first one, much like a river.  Rivers are also prominent in Ulysses.  And I have read Ulysses, which is how I know that the main river in Dublin is sometimes called the Anna Liffey.  And one of the characters in Finnegans Wake is named Anna Livia, referring to the river.

So between the name Anna and the broken sentence, I'm pretty sure that the Anna in An Imperial Affliction is meant to have some connection via Finnegans Wake with rivers.  What I'm unsure of is what that connection means.

To some degree, it fits with "a desert blessing, and ocean curse."  An Imperial Affliction is one of the things that brings Hazel and Augustus closer to-gether, so it shares some responsibility in changing Hazel's view on relationships.  There's also the connection between rivers and water, as in Augustus Waters.

But I'm wondering if there isn't also a connection with life in general.  At one point, Hazel deconstructs her world and returns to "the beginning when there was the Word, and to live in that vacuous uncreated space alone with the Word."  John 1:1 explains that "In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God."  And in the beginning, "the Spirit of God was hovering over the face of the waters" (Genesis 1:2).  So God is connected to water.  There's also just the fact that water is necessary for life.  This works well because of the visual connection between life and Liffey.

I'm not sure what the connection means, but I'm pretty sure that Anna is connected with rivers - both via the interrupted sentence that resembles the interrupted yet flowing sentence of Finnegans Wake and via her nominal connection with the Anna Liffey river.

Blessing, Curse, and Metaphor

About a week ago, I finished The Fault in Our Stars for the third time.  Over a few days afterwards, I had a few thoughts about it.  This is the first of two posts about them.

Near the end of the novel, Augustus Waters comments on the water that fills up in Hazel's lungs because of her cancer.  He writes that it's "a desert blessing, an ocean curse."  And while he's talking about the "dark cancer water," his phrase also applies to an-other type of water:  Augustus Waters himself.

A good portion of the novel deals with the effects of people upon other people.  Two different views on this, specifically regarding others' deaths, are presented in the novel.  At the beginning, Hazel believes that she's a grenade.  "I just want to stay away from people and read books and think and be with you guys [her parents] because there's nothing I can do about hurting you; you're too invested, so just please let me do that, okay?"  Because she knows that her death is inevitable, she wants to prevent people from becoming invested because that investment will later cause grief upon her death.

But after meeting Augustus Waters and falling in love with him, her position changes.  The book ends with her affirming her choice in who hurts her and in whom she is invested, namely: Augustus Waters.  She recognizes that death will cause grief but also that that does not invalidate the relationships that people have.  The curse does not replace the blessing.  And because Augustus Waters is the catalyst for this change in perspective, it's fitting that the blessing/curse description is of water.

What I'm a bit unsure of is whether Augustus Waters realizes how apt this is - the literal description of the water in Hazel's lungs matching the metaphorical water in his own name and self.  He's a character who bases his actions of their metaphorical implications, so it seems unlikely (even incongruous) that he would miss something like this, but he never explicitly talks about it.

True Love & Plants

I've been reading Ovid's Metamorphoses recently.  I had started it at the end of May, but I got busy because of an online class I was taking, so I just re-started it last week.

At the beginning of Book IV is the story of Pyramus and Thisbe, which I had some familiarity with because we talked about it in my Shakespeare class.  I've forgotten the specific connection, but it's somehow involved with A Midsummer Night's Dream.  Also, it's what Shakespeare stole part of the plot of Romeo and Juliet from.  (After learning about everything that Shakespeare stole, I'm sort of surprised that he's hailed as a paragon instead of denounced as a plagiarist.)

The rest of this contains spoilers, both for Pyramus and Thisbe and the folk song "Barbara Allen."

Because of parental disapproval, Pyramus and Thisbe decide to sneak out and meet in the woods.  While Thisbe is waiting, a lion surprises her, and as Thisbe runs away, she drops her cloak.  The lion chews up her cloak, and, since it's just eaten a lamb, it leaves blood on the cloak.  Pyramus shows up to see the bloody cloak and the lion's footprints and presumes Thisbe dead, so, in his overwhelming grief, he stabs himself.  Then Thisbe re-appears and - noticing that Pyramus is dead - stabs herself.

This all happens beneath a tree.  As Thisbe says, "And you, O tree whose branches weave their shadows / Dark over the pitiful body of one lover / Shall soon bear shade for two."  After Thisbe's death, the narrator explains that "the ripe fruit of the tree turned deep rose colour."

Which has a similarity with "Barbara Allen."  Because of its nature as a folk song, there are many different versions, but the one I'm most familiar with is the demo that Simon & Garfunkel did (titled "Barbriallen"), which was released as a bonus track on Sounds of Silence.  (Roger McGuinn also includes it in his Folk Den.)  William is dying because he slighted Barbara when he was drinking at the tavern.  He has his servant call her to him, but she seems indifferent about his death, remarking merely, "Young man, I think you're dyin'."  At his funeral procession, she feels bad about this (presumably) and then also dies.

They buried sweet Willy in the old church yard
And Barbara in the new one
From Willy's grave there grew a rose
From Barbara's a green briar 

They grew and they grew on the old church wall
And could not grow no higher
And there they tied in a true love's knot
The rosebush and the briar

The interlinking of the rosebush and the briar is what I'm calling attention to because it's the same sort of thing that happens in Ovid's account of Pyramus and Thisbe.  After Pyramus and Thisbe's deaths under the tree, the fruit changes color, and after William and Barbara's burials, the plants that grow from their graves intertwine.  In both cases, plants acknowledge the love that each couple had for each other.